WASHINGTON: So - next stop, Baghdad? That is what some Bush administration officials are hoping in the wake of the resounding success of the war in Afghanistan. Having so swiftly routed the Taliban, they proclaim, the US should now move to depose Saddam Hussein and rid itself of a terrorist threat even greater than Al Qaeda.

According to this thinking, the United States can adopt a strategy similar to the one it used in Afghanistan: If the US can only empower and help the Iraqi opposition, then Saddam’s regime, too, can be undone. For these officials, a number of whom are veterans of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it is not a surprising way to think: They hearken back to the 1980s and the Nicaraguan contras’ war against the Sandinistas as another example of the successful use of internal opposition to dislodge an undesirable regime.

But imagining that the US can duplicate these happy outcomes in Iraq could be dangerous. Not only is Saddam Hussein hardly the pushover the Taliban has turned out to be, there is a real question as to whether a credible Iraqi opposition exists anywhere other than in the minds of a few hawks in Washington. Certainly, there is no fighting force comparable to the Northern Alliance for the United States to back.

When people speak of the “Iraqi opposition,” they are generally referring to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), headquartered in London and led by Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, a banker with a PhD in mathematics from MIT and strong contacts in Washington. This is the group upon which Congress has bestowed its largess since the end of the Persian Gulf War, and the group some Bush administration officials and supporters on the Hill still champion as the great hope of Iraqi liberation.

The INC is nominally an umbrella organization uniting a variety of regime opponents, including the two largest constituent groups of the Iraqi demographic mosaic: the Kurds of the north (who make up 20 to 25 per cent of the Iraqi population) and the Shias of the south and of Baghdad’s shantytowns (the country’s majority at 55 per cent). But unity, in the case of the INC, is strictly a relative term. For its entire existence, the group has reflected and suffered from the divisions that have historically bedevilled Iraq and enabled regimes such as Saddam’s to survive.

Chalabi, who singlehandedly built the INC from the ground up, is a Shia who has tried to remain above the sectarian fray, but he cannot escape the suspicions of the Sunni minority of central Iraq, which is as critical to any coalition in Iraq as the Pakhtoons are in Afghanistan. Saddam not only bases his power on this Sunni minority, but to keep them in line, he exploits their fear that his overthrow would give rise to a vengeful Shia-based regime.

It was a debacle for the INC. With its networks smashed, the organization lost much of its international credibility. Chalabi and others were forced to flee to the West. The Clinton administration’s decision to retaliate by launching a few cruise missiles at targets in southern Iraq further disheartened the movement, and internal tensions degenerated into squabbling. Increasingly, Iraqi opposition figures complained about Chalabi’s autocratic style and his reluctance to share information. The Kurds remained under the INC umbrella, mostly to please the United States, but ceased to be eager supporters. More and more, the INC seemed to derive its strength not from its component parts, but from Chalabi’s Washington connections. Slowly, Chalabi seemed to become the INC, and the INC nothing more than Chalabi.

The INC today exists essentially in name only. Both the Kurds and the Shias pay only the feeblest lip service to the group. These two groups are the only opposition movements with real forces on the ground in Iraq, but they would be highly unlikely to bow to the INC if the United States made a move against Saddam. No opposition movement in history, of course, has been absolutely free of internecine fighting.

Before the US engages in an opposition-based strategy in Iraq, it should explore alternatives to a direct military confrontation. The US’s greatest handicap in confronting the dictator is that no one wants it to intervene militarily: The regional powers, Russia, France and some of the US’s other European allies. These governments know that a US administration flush with victory in Afghanistan and with significant domestic public support can do just about anything it chooses. If they do not want the US to go in with guns blazing, they need to get behind a diplomatic strategy —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.